Competition for housing stock is rapidly increasing in the United States. In some areas turnover of housing is extremely small and cannot satisfy demand. The problem is exacerbated as people live longer and stay in their residences for longer periods than in the past. Young families have significant difficulties finding suitable existing homes for rent or purchase in many desirable areas.
Current and useful information about housing stock is often both incomplete and inaccurate. While some details can be found at governmental websites (tax authorities, planning departments) and at sites such as Zillow, Trulia, Redin, etc., there is no easy mechanism by which a prospective renter or purchaser can search and locate properties that—while not in perfect condition—may be good leads. For example many homes are dilapidated or in poor condition as a result of owners being unable to maintain such properties (or attendant grounds) because of age, poor health, etc. In some instances the structure is not even inhabited. These homes would be excellent leads for housing opportunities but currently go undiscovered and thus unexploited due to inadequate research and assessment tools.
In a similar vein other interested parties would benefit from more detailed knowledge on the types and conditions of housing stock in their areas. For example public agencies should be kept aware of the health and welfare of citizens who may be too elderly to travel on their own, or respond to phone calls. Construction and home building supply, insurance and other providers are also similarly unable to quickly and accurately assess the health of housing stock with current tools.
While some tools have been used in the past to assess buildings, these have been limited and do not address the problems above. For example, generic image databases of real estate properties are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,216. U.S. Pat. No. 8,078,436 to Pershing et al., and US Publication No. 2003/0171957 to Watrous (both incorporated by reference herein) are all directed to simple overhead, top down aerial inspections of the roofs of structures. Such system typically rely on satellite or other image databases. Billman (U.S. Pat. No. 8,289,160) requires a number of sensors in a house from which he records data such as temperature, water pressure, humidity, etc. to assess a future risk of damage or destruction of the structure. Schwartz (US Publication No. 2004/0162710) requires a manual inspection form for rating a risk of mold. Similarly, Pendergast et al. (5,842,148) incorporates a manual inspection form that is used to assess a risk of damage to a house as a result of physical disturbance such as wind, earthquakes, etc.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,742,335 issued in 1998 to Cannon (incorporated by reference herein) teaches the use of a camera system for surveying a property. The setup is quite complicated, however, and requires extensive manpower to implement. Maciejczak (U.S. Pat. No. 4,550,376 incorporated by reference) similarly uses a complex unmanned apparatus for capturing condition information for a structure. However, in both references little or no automated processing is done of the captured structure information. Cannon for example teaches only that recordings capture over time can be manually examined to detect weathering changes. Despite these older teaching, the state of the art has not improved beyond what is shown therein.
In addition there is a considerable market in the US for home improvement goods and services, such as for example, windows, landscaping, siding, paint, roofing, plumbing and similar products to name a few. Companies in this space have traditionally used generic flyers for marketing purposes, as they have little or no specific structural information for a specific property. Current hard copy advertising materials therefore are represented by the examples shown in FIG. 9. Furthermore, to date such types of entities have not targeted groups of homes in a neighborhood by identifying common issues with structures that could induce or at least incentivize group purchasing behavior.